Totally Corrective Multiclass Boosting with Binary Weak Learners

In this work, we propose a new optimization framework for multiclass boosting learning. In the literature, AdaBoost.MO and AdaBoost.ECC are the two successful multiclass boosting algorithms, which can use binary weak learners. We explicitly derive these two algorithms' Lagrange dual problems based on their regularized loss functions. We show that the Lagrange dual formulations enable us to design totally-corrective multiclass algorithms by using the primal-dual optimization technique. Experiments on benchmark data sets suggest that our multiclass boosting can achieve a comparable generalization capability with state-of-the-art, but the convergence speed is much faster than stage-wise gradient descent boosting. In other words, the new totally corrective algorithms can maximize the margin more aggressively.Comment: 11 page

Mathematical Programming Decoding of Binary Linear Codes: Theory and Algorithms

Mathematical programming is a branch of applied mathematics and has recently been used to derive new decoding approaches, challenging established but often heuristic algorithms based on iterative message passing. Concepts from mathematical programming used in the context of decoding include linear, integer, and nonlinear programming, network flows, notions of duality as well as matroid and polyhedral theory. This survey article reviews and categorizes decoding methods based on mathematical programming approaches for binary linear codes over binary-input memoryless symmetric channels.Comment: 17 pages, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Published July 201

Solving for multi-class using orthogonal coding matrices

A common method of generalizing binary to multi-class classification is the error correcting code (ECC). ECCs may be optimized in a number of ways, for instance by making them orthogonal. Here we test two types of orthogonal ECCs on seven different datasets using three types of binary classifier and compare them with three other multi-class methods: 1 vs. 1, one-versus-the-rest and random ECCs. The first type of orthogonal ECC, in which the codes contain no zeros, admits a fast and simple method of solving for the probabilities. Orthogonal ECCs are always more accurate than random ECCs as predicted by recent literature. Improvments in uncertainty coefficient (U.C.) range between 0.4--17.5% (0.004--0.139, absolute), while improvements in Brier score between 0.7--10.7%. Unfortunately, orthogonal ECCs are rarely more accurate than 1 vs. 1. Disparities are worst when the methods are paired with logistic regression, with orthogonal ECCs never beating 1 vs. 1. When the methods are paired with SVM, the losses are less significant, peaking at 1.5%, relative, 0.011 absolute in uncertainty coefficient and 6.5% in Brier scores. Orthogonal ECCs are always the fastest of the five multi-class methods when paired with linear classifiers. When paired with a piecewise linear classifier, whose classification speed does not depend on the number of training samples, classifications using orthogonal ECCs were always more accurate than the the remaining three methods and also faster than 1 vs. 1. Losses against 1 vs. 1 here were higher, peaking at 1.9% (0.017, absolute), in U.C. and 39% in Brier score. Gains in speed ranged between 1.1% and over 100%. Whether the speed increase is worth the penalty in accuracy will depend on the application

Enhanced Integrated Scoring for Cleaning Dirty Texts

An increasing number of approaches for ontology engineering from text are gearing towards the use of online sources such as company intranet and the World Wide Web. Despite such rise, not much work can be found in aspects of preprocessing and cleaning dirty texts from online sources. This paper presents an enhancement of an Integrated Scoring for Spelling error correction, Abbreviation expansion and Case restoration (ISSAC). ISSAC is implemented as part of a text preprocessing phase in an ontology engineering system. New evaluations performed on the enhanced ISSAC using 700 chat records reveal an improved accuracy of 98% as compared to 96.5% and 71% based on the use of only basic ISSAC and of Aspell, respectively.Comment: More information is available at http://explorer.csse.uwa.edu.au/reference